Hi, I'm Zoe Mendelson. Once, I googled whether or not all women can squirt. I did’t find anything conclusive on the subject but I did stumble across a medical journal article about the clit orgasm and the “g-spot” orgasm and how they’re not two separate things. They activate each other in one perfectly integrated system! And I was like WHAT! And I was also absolutely sure that every single person with a pussy* that I know would want to know this information. But, as I read, the article referred to different parts of my body and I couldn’t imagine what or where they were. It occurred to me that I didn’t know very much about my pussy.

A lot of other people don’t either. Medical science has only recently taken an interest in female anatomy beyond reproduction. Up until recently, the clitoris was not even mentioned in many medical textbooks(8). And outside of medical science, people with pussies in western civilization have been denied access to information about their bodies for centuries for cultural, religious, and patriarchal reasons.

But learning about pussies is our right, poor-quality and inaccessible information is a dangerous injustice, and shame about vaginas should be a thing of the past. So we want to make Pussypedia.

Talcum powder increases risk of ovarian cancer (the odds of ovarian cancer were 1.3 times higher among women who used talc compared to women who did not(2). Women who douche once per week or more experience bacterial vaginosis 1.17 times more often than women who do not douche.(3) Pubic grooming related injuries (e.g. from waxing/shaving) have been steadily increasing since the early 2000s.(4) Labiaplasty is now the world’s fastest growing cosmetic procedure,(5) despite a lack of evidence that it’s even safe.(6)

In a vacuum of information, most of what we learn about our bodies comes from the very advertisers trying to sell us things that not only do we not need, but also actively damage us. Products and ignorance endanger our health, and their messages make us feel grossed out and confused by our vaginas. Shame decreases sexual pleasure(7).

Meanwhile, good information is hard to find. Most sex ed sorely lacks --or worse-- reinforces shame. Online sources often don’t cite their information and contradict each other. Journal articles are out of reach—behind paywalls and impossible to understand without considerable background knowledge. The good resources on the internet--we don’t deny that they exist--are hard to find. We want to change that.

We need a lot of money to build Pussypedia: about $20,000 USD. We are not expecting to be able to fund Pussypedia entirely right now. This campaign is an effort to raise money to build the basic infrastructure of the site, and depending on how much is collected, to launch with portals to good quality content elsewhere on the internet for at least three of our topics, and a small batch of 40-100 articles. From there we will apply for grants like madwomen.